So, wait…. He got a bunch of money, along with the shiny precious thingy. Then he kept making more than enough money doing some kind of work, but not enough to buy paintings or gyms or something like that. That’s somehow a problem. Now, some dude gives him money “for” the precious, but doesn’t actually “get” it in the end…. This precious is very powerful indeed. There were certainly many others ostensibly “bidding” for it, so how many times will he profit?

What are the odds he puts it back up for sale and goes for another few million dollars? He needs all the money he can get if he’s trying to buy back his tainted reputation and some public goodwill through “charitable giving.” Which is really nothing more than a selfserving attempt to gratify his own narcissistic needs for attention and adulation.

We’d be in favor of stripping people of their prize for saying and doing awful shit because otherwise it just taints and devalues it. A nobel? Oh big deal, they hand those out even to racist, sexist, minsogynst shitbirds and douchcanoes like Jimmy over here. Given the statistics on the prevelance of rape, there are bound to be some rapists and rape-apologists among the past winners too.

Is it really worth it to reward such people with money, notoriety, etc.? Why can’t they just include an ethics clause in the terms and conditions or something, where violation of said clause is grounds for forfeiture of the medal and repayment of any prize money?

I don’t get this. Was Watson selling it because he’s poor? It doesn’t sound like it since both he and the Russian oligarch want the money to go to scientific research. Also, according to the article, Watson was considering buying a “Hockney painting”, whatever that is. So why didn’t the guy just donate the money without the mess of buying the medal and giving it back? Is he just trying to make Watson his pet?

That seems like a very inefficient method of donating money to Watson. I was under the impression auction houses charge like 15% on top of the sale price – once he heard of the sale, why not make private arrangements with Watson?

In a somewhat juster world, Watson would have to pay some hefty taxes twice, first for the sale second for getting a gift worth 4.6 millions. Given the world we live in, he probably gets a tax return.

AsqJames

That seems like a very inefficient method of donating money to Watson. I was under the impression auction houses charge like 15% on top of the sale price – once he heard of the sale, why not make private arrangements with Watson?

Now, you’re sounding like somebody for whom 15% of 4.6 million is an enormous amount of money, like something you’d hope to earn within a few decades or so.
Think more about buying a bag of potatoe chips which would indeed be 10ct cheaper in another store but you’re at this store right now and don’t want to walk over there.
Yes, that’s what I call perverted in the bad sense.

Once again, the mega rich have no perspective. A scientist does shoddy research and announces a pretty horrific finding on the back of that research (one that will be used, probably for decades if not centuries, to justify racism). Scientists and citizens around the world denounce the ridiculous findings. Rich guy comes in, mentions how oppressed the poor poor racist is and proceeds to give him millions of dollars to fix his fee-fee’s. Fucking sweet…

Once again, the mega rich have no perspective. A scientist does shoddy research and announces a pretty horrific finding on the back of that research (one that will be used, probably for decades if not centuries, to justify racism). Scientists and citizens around the world denounce the ridiculous findings. Rich guy comes in, mentions how oppressed the poor poor racist is and proceeds to give him millions of dollars to fix his fee-fee’s. Fucking sweet…

Y’all seem to assume that the rich guy doesn’t approve of that “finding” …

I’m pretty sure the contract with the auctioneer covers the possibility of a vendor doing a side deal. To achieve the twin ends and not violate the contract, this was the only path: racist asshole gets his shiny both ways.

Remember that this generation of Russian oligarchs is the first one in some time. The evil barstewards are smart, in ways inbred Western ones aren’t. If there were a better way, he’d have done that instead.

The article PZ linked to a few days ago implied that he didn’t really need the money (IIRC, it listed his annual salary at $347,000 or thereabouts and said he has an apartment in New York, a home on Long Island, and other assets). It suggested that it appeared that he (allegedly) wanted money to endow a chair or to give to Cold Spring Harbor (*).

*Incidentally, but probably not entirely coincidentally, the home of the eugenics movement in the US during the decades prior to World War II. Their web site about the history of eugenics remains fairly creepy.

The financial implications are interesting. Typically an auction house like Christie’s takes commission twice, once from the seller (Watson) and once from the buyer (the oligarch). The size depends on a lot of factors, including the terms of their deal with Watson, but assume for the sake of argument Watson might have paid 10-15% of the sale price to the auction house. This can be very variable; it’s even possible that Watson paid them nothing and got a share of the buyer’s premium, netting him more than just the sale price. That’s not the standard arrangement, though. Either way the oligarch is out more than 2x the cost of the medal, since he paid Watson (by returning it) and the auction house (by buying it) plus the buyer’s premium.

For those asking why the oligarch would do things this way, it’s very unlikely that this was part of a plan. I seriously doubt a major auction house would go along with anything that even looked like a sham auction. It’s safe to assume that the oligarch wanted the prestige of buying and returning the medal, but probably wouldn’t have bothered with any gift to Watson if he hadn’t won the auction.

I don’t think Watson will have to pay income tax on the gift, assuming that the oligarch is giving the medal back out of a “detached and disinterested generosity.” (I think this is true of gifts from foreign persons, although the rules are a bit different. Surely Watson can afford a good accountant.)

The evil barstewards are smart, in ways inbred Western ones aren’t. If there were a better way, he’d have done that instead.

You’re very naive if you think that Western plutocrats are more inbred than those in a dictatorship. They aren’t smart either, at least most of them (in some cases their stupidity is staggering). Since almost no-one can tell say how they got started or how they managed to get the lucrative deals that made twenty-year-olds into the richest men on earth, I’d say it’s a pretty good guess that they’re usually just front men for powerful Siloviky.

Sold a medal for millions of dollars, and then got it handed right back to him? I think we have stumbled upon the recipe for infinite moneys! Alert your nearest economist! Recruit your nearest odious Nobel Prize winner! We have some international, regressive plutocrats to feed into a Perpetual Money Machine!

Either way the oligarch is out more than 2x the cost of the medal, since he paid Watson (by returning it) and the auction house (by buying it) plus the buyer’s premium.

Wut? He is out whatever he paid to buy it, including whatever premiums. He didn’t have the medal before or after the transactions, presumably – so you can’t count that. That’s like saying a 1€ carton of milk costs €2 since first you buy it, and then you drink it.